young friend Edward Ayer has a noble collection of books relating
to the history of American aboriginals and to the wars waged
between those Indians and the settlers in this country; my other
young friend Luther Mills has gathered together a multitude of
books treating of the Napoleonic wars; yet neither Ayer nor Mills
hath ever slain a man or fought a battle, albeit both find
delectation in recitals of warlike prowess and personal valor. I
love the night and all the poetic influences of that quiet time,
but I do not sit up all night in order to hear the nightingale or
to contemplate the astounding glories of the heavens.

For similar reasons, much as I appreciate and marvel at the
beauties of early morning, I do not make a practice of early
rising, and sensible as I am to the charms of the babbling brook
and of the crystal lake, I am not addicted to the practice of
wading about in either to the danger either to my own health or
to the health of the finny denizens in those places.

The best anglers in the world are those who do not catch fish;
the mere slaughter of fish is simply brutal, and it was with a
view to keeping her excellent treatise out of the hands of the
idle and the inappreciative that Dame Berners incorporated that
treatise in a compendious book whose cost was so large that only
``gentyll and noble men'' could possess it. What mind has he
who loveth fishing merely for the killing it involves--what mind
has such a one to the beauty of the ever-changing panorama which
nature unfolds to the appreciative eye, or what communion has he
with those sweet and uplifting influences in which the meadows,
the hillsides, the glades, the dells, the forests, and the
marshes abound?